Reinforcement learning (RL) has proven effective in strengthening the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). A widely adopted method, Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has shown strong empirical results in training DeepSeek-R1. However, GRPO fails to update the policy when all responses within a group are incorrect (i.e., \emph{all-negative-sample} groups). This limitation underscores a key gap between artificial and human intelligence: unlike humans, who can learn from mistakes, GRPO discards these signals. Our first contribution is to introduce a simple framework that mitigates the all-negative-sample issue by incorporating response diversity within groups using a \textit{step-wise} judge model, which can be either directly trained or adapted from existing LLMs. We prove that this diversification can accelerate GRPO's learning dynamics in a simplified setting. We also empirically validate the proposed stepwise guided policy optimization (SGPO) method, demonstrating consistent gains across model sizes (7B, 14B, 32B) in offline and online training on 9 benchmarks, including base and distilled variants. Our results highlight two advantages: (i) SGPO surpasses GRPO, especially in the early and mid-training stages where all-negative-sample groups are prevalent; and (ii) SGPO does not require judge models to generate correct answers, differentiating it from knowledge distillation methods.

Understanding the decision-making processes of neural networks is a central goal of mechanistic interpretability. In the context of Large Language Models (LLMs), this involves uncovering the underlying mechanisms and identifying the roles of individual model components such as neurons and attention heads, as well as model abstractions such as the learned sparse features extracted by Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs). A rapidly growing line of work tackles this challenge by using powerful generator models to produce open-vocabulary, natural language concept descriptions for these components. In this paper, we provide the first survey of the emerging field of concept descriptions for model components and abstractions. We chart the key methods for generating these descriptions, the evolving landscape of automated and human metrics for evaluating them, and the datasets that underpin this research. Our synthesis reveals a growing demand for more rigorous, causal evaluation. By outlining the state of the art and identifying key challenges, this survey provides a roadmap for future research toward making models more transparent.

Trained on internet-scale video data, generative world models are increasingly recognized as powerful world simulators that can generate consistent and plausible dynamics over structure, motion, and physics. This raises a natural question: with the advent of strong video foundational models, might they supplant conventional vision encoder paradigms for general-purpose multimodal understanding? While recent studies have begun to explore the potential of world models on common vision tasks, these explorations typically lack a systematic investigation of generic, multimodal tasks. In this work, we strive to investigate the capabilities when world model priors are transferred into Vision-Language Models: we re-purpose a video diffusion model as a generative encoder to perform a single denoising step and treat the resulting latents as a set of visual embedding. We empirically investigate this class of models, which we refer to as World-Language Models (WorldLMs), and we find that generative encoders can capture latents useful for downstream understanding that show distinctions from conventional encoders. Naming our best-performing variant Dynamic Vision Aligner (DyVA), we further discover that this method significantly enhances spatial reasoning abilities and enables single-image models to perform multi-frame reasoning. Through the curation of a suite of visual reasoning tasks, we find DyVA to surpass both open-source and proprietary baselines, achieving state-of-the-art or comparable performance. We attribute these gains to WorldLM's inherited motion-consistency internalization from video pre-training. Finally, we systematically explore extensive model designs to highlight promising directions for future work. We hope our study can pave the way for a new family of VLMs that leverage priors from world models and are on a promising path towards generalist vision learners.

Semantic Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) is a critical area of research within robotics and computer vision, focusing on the simultaneous localization of robotic systems and associating semantic information to construct the most accurate and complete comprehensive model of the surrounding environment. Since the first foundational work in Semantic SLAM appeared more than two decades ago, this field has received increasing attention across various scientific communities. Despite its significance, the field lacks comprehensive surveys encompassing recent advances and persistent challenges. In response, this study provides a thorough examination of the state-of-the-art of Semantic SLAM techniques, with the aim of illuminating current trends and key obstacles. Beginning with an in-depth exploration of the evolution of visual SLAM, this study outlines its strengths and unique characteristics, while also critically assessing previous survey literature. Subsequently, a unified problem formulation and evaluation of the modular solution framework is proposed, which divides the problem into discrete stages, including visual localization, semantic feature extraction, mapping, data association, and loop closure optimization. Moreover, this study investigates alternative methodologies such as deep learning and the utilization of large language models, alongside a review of relevant research about contemporary SLAM datasets. Concluding with a discussion on potential future research directions, this study serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers seeking to navigate the complex landscape of Semantic SLAM.

Game solving aims to find the optimal strategies for all players and determine the theoretical outcome of a game. However, due to the exponential growth of game trees, many games remain unsolved, even though methods like AlphaZero have demonstrated super-human level in game playing. The Relevance-Zone (RZ) is a local strategy reuse technique that restricts the search to only the regions relevant to the outcome, significantly reducing the search space. However, RZs are not unique. Different solutions may result in RZs of varying sizes. Smaller RZs are generally more favorable, as they increase the chance of reuse and improve pruning efficiency. To this end, we propose an iterative RZ reduction method that repeatedly solves the same position while gradually restricting the region involved, guiding the solver toward smaller RZs. We design three constraint generation strategies and integrate an RZ Pattern Table to fully leverage past solutions. In experiments on 7x7 Killall-Go, our method reduces the average RZ size to 85.95% of the original. Furthermore, the reduced RZs can be permanently stored as reusable knowledge for future solving tasks, especially for larger board sizes or different openings.

Recent large-scale reasoning models have achieved state-of-the-art performance on challenging mathematical benchmarks, yet the internal mechanisms underlying their success remain poorly understood. In this work, we introduce the notion of a reasoning graph, extracted by clustering hidden-state representations at each reasoning step, and systematically analyze three key graph-theoretic properties: cyclicity, diameter, and small-world index, across multiple tasks (GSM8K, MATH500, AIME 2024). Our findings reveal that distilled reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B) exhibit significantly more recurrent cycles (about 5 per sample), substantially larger graph diameters, and pronounced small-world characteristics (about 6x) compared to their base counterparts. Notably, these structural advantages grow with task difficulty and model capacity, with cycle detection peaking at the 14B scale and exploration diameter maximized in the 32B variant, correlating positively with accuracy. Furthermore, we show that supervised fine-tuning on an improved dataset systematically expands reasoning graph diameters in tandem with performance gains, offering concrete guidelines for dataset design aimed at boosting reasoning capabilities. By bridging theoretical insights into reasoning graph structures with practical recommendations for data construction, our work advances both the interpretability and the efficacy of large reasoning models.

Domain models enable autonomous agents to solve long-horizon tasks by producing interpretable plans. However, in open-world environments, a single general domain model cannot capture the variety of tasks, so agents must generate suitable task-specific models on the fly. Large Language Models (LLMs), with their implicit common knowledge, can generate such domains, but suffer from high error rates that limit their applicability. Hence, related work relies on extensive human feed-back or prior knowledge, which undermines autonomous, open-world deployment. In this work, we propose LODGE, a framework for autonomous domain learning from LLMs and environment grounding. LODGE builds on hierarchical abstractions and automated simulations to identify and correct inconsistencies between abstraction layers and between the model and environment. Our framework is task-agnostic, as it generates predicates, operators, and their preconditions and effects, while only assuming access to a simulator and a set of generic, executable low-level skills. Experiments on two International Planning Competition ( IPC) domains and a robotic assembly domain show that LODGE yields more accurate domain models and higher task success than existing methods, requiring remarkably few environment interactions and no human feedback or demonstrations.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing implementations, such as in-context learning and fine-tuning, remain costly and inefficient. To improve CoT reasoning at a lower cost, and inspired by the task vector paradigm, we introduce CoT Vectors, compact representations that encode task-general, multi-step reasoning knowledge. Through experiments with Extracted CoT Vectors, we observe pronounced layer-wise instability, manifesting as a U-shaped performance curve that reflects a systematic three-stage reasoning process in LLMs. To address this limitation, we propose Learnable CoT Vectors, optimized under a teacher-student framework to provide more stable and robust guidance. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and models demonstrate that CoT Vectors not only outperform existing baselines but also achieve performance comparable to parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods, while requiring fewer trainable parameters. Moreover, by treating CoT Vectors as a probe, we uncover how their effectiveness varies due to latent space structure, information density, acquisition mechanisms, and pre-training differences, offering new insights into the functional organization of multi-step reasoning in LLMs. The source code will be released.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

An associative memory is a structure learned from a dataset M of vectors (signals) in a way such that, given a noisy version of one of the vectors as input, the nearest valid vector from M (nearest neighbor) is provided as output, preferably via a fast iterative algorithm. Traditionally, binary (or q -ary) Hopfield neural networks are used to model the above structure. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a model of associative memory based on sparse recovery of signals. Our basic premise is simple. For a dataset, we learn a set of linear constraints that every vector in the dataset must satisfy. Provided these linear constraints possess some special properties, it is possible to cast the task of finding nearest neighbor as a sparse recovery problem. Assuming generic random models for the dataset, we show that it is possible to store super-polynomial or exponential number of n -length vectors in a neural network of size O ( n) . Furthermore, given a noisy version of one of the stored vectors corrupted in near-linear number of coordinates, the vector can be correctly recalled using a neurally feasible algorithm.